Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘pastel’

I’ve just seen so many people doing complicated double accent nails, and I wanted to try it! Also I love this purple.

I feel like I cheated with this because the complicated nails are just water decals. This whole mani took under an hour, and as usual, most of that was waiting for the polish to dry! Unfortunately, the decal nails did need a white base (instead of just applying them over a base-coated nail) because the decals are not opaque. They are beautiful regardless!

Yes, there is a gradient from blue-to-purple and a black stamp. There is ALSO a reversed stamp (purple-to-blue) under the black one made of swirls, it just does’t show up well!

I couldn’t decide if this looked more like cobblestones (which was the intention) or funky corn. I have seen images on line with other bloggers using the stamp as corn and it looks amazing, so I might stick with that in the future! Although it means I will have to paint my nails yellow (wwwww).

That’s it for this week! Hopefully I can get my act together and put together something a little more interested for next week (or at least aim for a theme that isn’t “stamped”). I did 3-4 valentines-themed manicures so that’s what will hopefully get posted! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

This idea got into my head and I just had to run with it! I wanted to make a purple-white-floral overlay, and then add a rectangular stud to make it look like they were being buckled together. Ta-da!

I made nail art using the full nail water decal that you see spread across the tips of my nails here, but honestly I like the way this came out better. Don’t get me wrong, the whole decal is stunning, but there is something about this mani that keeps me coming back to it.

Also the base color here is yet another polish pickup pack shade, this is called Just One Look by Painted Polish, and it is from the August options. This is three thin coats and I adore this polish! It goes on a little thick, but the pastel purple is stunning and I love the linear holo background with the larger holo glitters!

The born pretty store is having a rather impressive sale right now, so you can find this set of decals (with two others) on sale for 99 cents here! Gotta say, I love that these are opaque and yet thin, so if you are into decals I recommend them! Enjoy!

Rainbow nails! Finally! This is kinda a combo of day 9 “rainbow” and day 10 “gradient” cause it is a rainbow gradient! I haven’t been brave enough to wear rainbows to the hospital yet; these are from the vault.

I absolutely love this mani. Bright colors, strips, gradients…it has it all! That said, the post going up on Wednesday for stripes day has even MORE stripes. Or at least, they are the focus of the nail art itself.

I always find myself gravitating towards sparkly polish with shimmer and flakes and holo…and then I have to remind myself that if I’m being honest I use my brightly colored creme polishes a LOT more frequently than any of my crazy glitters! Because they really are better for nail art.

That said, I have yet to buy an appropriate neon green creme, so the subtle shimmer in this mani is from the neon green polish! It was a gift, but I really need a creme variety. If you guys have any advice for bright neon green cremes let me know!

This is a bit of a sad day: tomorrow I leave Philly for St Louis. So, this is my last nail art post while in Philadelphia. Philly was where I first discovered nail art, and in the last 7 years my collection has gone from 2 polishes to over 400. I was thinking of posting a pretty skyline design I did, but I ran out of time to edit it (this is becoming a theme) so you’ll have to make do with some shimmery leaves.

This is the mani I created out of my pastel teal swatches, and so there are more teals than you might imagine! I did a dry brush of each of the 4 colors (three cremes and one holo) over each other, and then double stamped over the top with a gold glitter and then a green holo glitter. I really like how it came out!

I am glad I went for the dry brush technique, the bases all ended up looking roughly the same by the time I got to stamping. I also think this is the first time I’ve actually liked stamping the same image twice? Usually I try too hard or the colors are awkward together. But green and gold always works!

Initially, I was going to stamp gold then black, but my eyes fell on Dragon which I haven’t used in probably a year, and I grabbed it. A England polishes always stamp so well! It makes sense, since basically all of them are one-coaters. Adina is nuts. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! And goodbye Philly! My next post will be from St Louis…but since I move in on Monday we probably won’t have internet for a few days. Sorry! I will also have some freehand art up eventually…I do have some in the vault I just haven’t edited that either, I know it’s been a lot of stamping post recently!

Light blues: I should start by saint that hate light blue polish. I kept thinking as I was laying out these polishes “why do I never wear any of these?” I feel like for all of my other swatch tests (and there will be quite a few more) there were a couple polishes I gravitated towards for base colors or nail art, and with this set of blue there was nothing that I found exciting. To be fair, if I need a pastel blue I grab Zoya Blu and if I need a medium blue I grab one of my other three blue Zoya cremes…so it is really only the range between pastel and medium blue where I have this problem.

While swatching, I realized WHY I hate using these shades of blue. None of them are opaque enough! Ugh. Breezy took three THICK coats and even so was barely opaque. Cinderella was legitimately still see-through where my free edge is and this was with three thick coats. Boat only took three regular coats but is a bit thicker than I would like as a polish, and Rather is both a bit thick and dries matte (which is why these swatch photos do not have top coat). In summary, all of these polishes took three coats, and Breezy and Cinderella were still not quite opaque at three thick coats. That said, I do love the pink shimmer in Cinderella (I would believe this polish to be the color of glass slippers), and the slightly grey finish to Boat. I cannot stand the subtle frost in Breezy, and I am probably just getting rid of this polish since I have Blu which I know I love.

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Pastel teals: I own three very very similar pastel teal polishes because unlike the blues, I love pastel teal! It is such a pretty soft color. I basically wanted a pale teal and a pale green…but a pale green looks much like a pale teal! The three of these (minus my pinky of course) ended up being very close in color, but not quite dupes!

The holo polish, Jaded, took only two thin coats, the rest were three. Worries was slightly more jelly-like than the other two, and so I used thicker coats, but it dried quickly so overall the finishes were the same. In terms of comparisons, Tiana is the palest of the three, while Worries is the closest to green rather than teal. Envy is slightly more blue and slightly brighter than Tiana, but they are very close! It does have a better formula (thinner but just as pigmented). I bought Worries and Tiana when I ran out of my first bottle of Envy (this is my third, I think) and since I use pastels a lot I just kept all three. I don’t honestly think I need them all, but I think I might keep them anyway? Tiana is the one that I could part with most easily, as Worries is more green and Envy does have the best finish! I just threw Jaded in since the base color is the same, but wheeee holo!

These came out cute! Although, sadly, they were cuter in my head. I just wanted something colorful and spring-y! I do wish that I had a left a bit more space between the flowers on some of my nails, but oh well.

The art is inspired by @lifeisbetterpolished, who has apparently changed her ID to @withlovekarissa and I had to hunt around and make sure I wasn’t tagging someone who stole her photos!

Anyway. Flowers, and negative space. I don’t usually go for negative space designs, but putting this on a white background seemed too…jarring.

It is amusing that 90% of the colors I used came from two pastel collections (Wet n’ Wild and Essie)! I should go back to buying collections that come out with rainbow colors with the same finish, it makes for the best nail art! Hope you enjoyed!

It’s the friday before easter! This only matters because it means I have to take a plane tonight :-p. Somehow, I’ve been wearing these nails all week and none of the fellows, residents, attendings, or patients noticed! My fellow med student did, at least!

The art was inspired by this pin. I just really like the periwinkle color coupled with the egg pattern! Of course, I had to add an easter bunny. The nails on my other hand don’t quite match (and don’t look very easter-y so they’ll be posted at a later point).

My ACTUAL easter nails are red, like the eggs used to crack each other at a greek easter party. It’s an odd tradition, since there are easily twice as many eggs as people at a given party and no one wants to eat them after they are all smashed up!

Anyway, happy friday and happy easter if you celebrate! I’ll be busy trying to avoid chametz (bread things) since it is still passover, but hopefully there will be chocolate mousse or truffles for me to eat for dessert and not just cake!

Do you want to know what is the most embarrassing part of this mani? I don’t actually know what color I used! It was either Green with Envy by Maybelline or Tiana by Zoya…but I don’t know which! Probably the Maybelline since it is just a TAD more teal (and the Zoya is a tad more green) but that could just be my screen.

I usually write down which colors (and stamps) I used when I put together a mani. I write the posts days to weeks later (only rarely do I write the post the day I actually paint the manicure), but at least I have the colors written down! Whoops.

This was a manicure I did when I was on my surgical rotation…which is why my nails are so short. I got away with having teal nails because the scrubs we wear at the site where I was were actually a beautiful mint color! Most scrubs are some shade of blue. I prefer the mint. One of the floor nurses noticed that my nails were not some demure shade…and that was it. Score for an all-male team I suppose!

Right now I am actually working in the emergency room, but they seem to care much less about being 100% presentable! Which is great for nail art. That’s all for today…I don’t have any sunlight photos of this mani because when it wasn’t raining I was in the operating room!

Rainbow day is usually my favorite day in the challenge…but this year nothing came to mind! I don’t know why. I did however find these in my recently-done-but-not-posted-yet folder, and since they are basically a pastel rainbow AND adorable I figured it worked!

It also helps that it is still summer (for a few days) so its totally ok to post ice cream cones 😀

The nail art was inspired by jamylyn_nails even though I have trouble with faces, still! I think its adorable.

I did a matte and a glossy version of these but I liked the matte version far better, so that’s what you are seeing! Mostly because shiny ice cream cones were very confusing to me.

Hope you enjoyed! I think I’ve only painted a few new nail arts for this challenge so far, most of these are from the ‘vault’. However, tomorrows is a new one at least!

Today begins a week of awesome manis! I don’t know why, but I enjoy clustering pretty manis into one week and less-than-ideal manis into other weeks. So this is an awesome week with some of my favorite manicure stemming back to March! Since I am me, that really means there will be a lot of bright colors this week.

This particular mani was just me going “fun with colors and gradients and striping tape!”. I wanted to add rhinestones below each gradient, but I didn’t have the right colors, so I just added a dot with my darkest gradient color. I love how it came out!

I actually forgot to write down the colors I used for this mani! I think my notes app deleted my initial note (again…oy, this has been a recurring theme). I’m not going to write them all down, I have a pretty good idea what color I used for each nail, so if you are curious just ask!

Unfortunately, the sun did not cooperate with this mani. Ergo, there are no happy sunlight photos 😦 Despite that, I’m alright with the quality of the ones I picked. Sun, come back and play!

In other news, it was 95 degrees out all weekend and I am sad. In protest to life, I didn’t paint my nails at all this weekend *gasp* although I did manage to assemble all 140 wedding invitations *bigger gasp*. Busy times!

Sometimes, something sounds great in theory and is a total flop in practice. I wanted to do a pastel water marble, and ended up with something so subtle that even I could barely see it, and I knew it was there!

To escape the fate of having almost-white nails, I grabbed a geometric stamp that I hadn’t used before for fear of messed up lines (clear stampers really have made everything better) and added some thick black designs over my marble.

In retrospect, I don’t remember why I wanted the stripe pattern for each nail to be different. Luckily my nails were short enough that I could get away with rotating the stamp, and it did come out looking alright! But…I have a clear stamper. I could have made them all identical. I don’t quite know what past-me was thinking!

This mani is something between awesome and a disaster. I had an idea and it didn’t pan out so I kept tweaking it. And somehow we ended up with pastels and neons in bright colors. And holo glitter. For fun.

So, there is a LOT going on here. We have a rough pastel gradient, some cut-out polish pieces, and a glitter topper. The gradient, although made of pastels, is even more subtle than I was hoping for, but I refused to move on from my pastel obsession into something easily observable. The cut-out geometric polish patterns are months old…and as such had dried and become brittle by the time of this mani. Oops!

Going forward, I’m going to try and store any decals/polish intending to be cut up and used on nails within a week of creating the decal. Otherwise the polish is just too darn hard to work with! That’s also why I ended up adding the glitter topper…some of the geometric pieces wouldn’t lie flat and I was getting impatient!

I just wrote this post. And it deleted itself. So now you guys don’t get much of an explanation because I really am too angry to re-write the whole thing, and its wayyy to early in the morning because I need to go to a science retreat today.

Voila, stamping decals. This time made with Emily de Molly plate 09. I colored everything in with pastels. Except the grey around the edges, which was a mistake.

This looks ok, not great. Oops. And I don’t even remember which pastels I used and (again) I am angry…so if you have a question about a particular color just ask.

Each decal is slightly different…you can see that below where I had them trimmed to size (trust me, you want to trim them before us use them, they are a pain to acetone down to size). The colors move from the inside-out as you go along from pinky to thumb.

I’ll have a full how-to for stamping decals sometime next week. In the meanwhile, you can look at an older post I did where I did a walk-through.

Hope you enjoyed, and sorry for the terse post. I just hate re-writing things!

This design might be one of my favorites since I started playing with the Textured Earth Tone polishes. Simple, yet pretty! I also like the 3D effect of layering the stitches over the other colors without top coat!

The base polish that I used is a very pretty pale beige textured matte polish called Gesso. It is one of my favorites from the collection…it manages to be elegant and subtle without being boring! The gold undertones help. Shown here in two coats. It was one of the easier ones to apply as well.

I painted on the other polishes mostly using the brush from the bottle, since each polish is opaque enough to easily cover the other colors. It helps that I used light ones!

I know, they make angled nail guides for this sort of art. But I am cheap and have not yet bought nail vinyls (although I sorely want some zig-zag ones) and so I went ahead and free-handed this. It took forever. I decided to make a gradient so that the white sections get larger and further apart. The inspiration came from @simplynailogical, and has been mimicked many times from what I can tell!

Despite taking forever, this mani was a lot of fun! I am not going to list all the colors (mostly pastel polishes) that I used in the gradient. I had never tried a 5-color angled gradient before that I had to switch angles on! It took some getting used to. But I like how it came out!

I was hesitant to matte this (just in case it got messed up) but I really like the end result. Yay matte finishes!

This manicure honors my first polish-buying binge in a month and a half. I got 4 colors. For $3. I’m really rather ok with this. My rite aid was having a buy-one-get-one for both wet n’ wild and maybelline.

All I actually WANTED was a light pink…and some pastels to round out my rather pathetic collection of yellows and oranges. I also nabbed a white (but the details on that will be in tomorrows post because why not?).

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the three pastel polishes. The orange and yellow (both maybelline) only took two coats, and dried rather quickly to a semi-gloss (it wasn’t quite matte). The light pink took three thin coats and dried nice and shiny. None of them are shown over white except where the white is visible.

Colors

White: Wet n’ Wild – French White Creme

Pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink

Orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach

Yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide

Of course, I had to go add nail art. That’s what I do. So…dots! I personally like the stripy nails better, but a lot of the girls in my lab preferred the dots. Each to their own!

Finally, the last of the KBShimmer winter holiday collection on display for your viewing pleasure! Phew, it took me months to get through these. Today we have Toastest with the Mostest. This one took so long because I could not figure out what to do with it!

Toastest with the Mostest is a glitter bomb that does not work well alone, but looks a bit odd over many of the colors that I’ve seen on the internet. If anything, it is because there are too many different colored glitters! We have pink, gold, and silver holographic circles of varying sizes, intended to invoke champagne. It is a lovely glitter mix, but just doesn’t work on a whole nail!

So, I did sort of a side-swept gradient. The results show off the glitter while still keeping the nail relatively simple! To achieve this look, I wiped most of the glitter off the brush, and just swept it over the corner of my nail. I had to push and pull at a few glitters to make sure they didn’t overlap, but it was very easy! Each nail needed only one brush swipe (lots of glitter!) except my thumb, where I used two.

The only glitter that I didn’t get out were the very large holo circles. Honestly, I have no idea what I would have done with one of those, so I consider this lucky! The pink base is what I am using to qualify for the GOT challenge today…it is actually the oldest pink I own!

Colors

Pink: NYC – Prospect Park Bloom

Glitter: KBShimmer – Toastest With The Mostest

I am happy with this whole collection, and the glitter bombs are awesome! This one is no exception. It even made a me like a ‘simple’ mani 🙂

Today’s Golden Oldies Thursday challenge calls for a skittle manicure. I debated doing all different things, but settled for the same thing in different colors! It is finally spring, and so time for some pastels. And I have been DYING to try a quilted mani! Moreover, some glitter studs I had ordered finally came in, so now I get to pair EVERYTHING with rhinestones 😀

From what I can tell (via the internet) there are two main ways to make a quilted mani. You can use striping tape, or you can use floss. I tried striping tape because I am more familiar with it…and next time (hopefully there will be a next time) I will try floss.

This manicure had three steps:

Add a pastel color of your choice to your nails

Add a slightly shimmery clear color on top, to create some distinction between your first color and your second. Ideally, this polish slightly lightens the base color. Also add top coat to speed up drying time.

Place striping tape on perpendicular diagonals across your nail, and add a thick layer of your starting polish. Quickly peel off the striping tape, revealing the quilt. Add rhinestones if desired. DO NOT TOP COAT to keep the texture!

Unfortunately, this manicure takes a while to dry (since there is no top coat on the last layer and it is a thick layer) but it was totally worth it! How cute is this?! Ok, so I’m biased. The worst part? I had forgotten I owned that pretty mint green! I guess that is the point of the GOT challenge, remember forgotten polishes.

While in Israel, I picked up 4 new polishes by an Israeli brand called WoW! One of them is on display today: is this beautiful glitter. Large and small white hexes with large teal hexes. It just looked like spring! So I had to use it with other spring colors 🙂 and “reinvent” a french manicure for the Lacquer Legion reinvention theme.

The glitter is shown (in two coats, no fishing required) over purple and blue on my ring finger and thumb. My other three nails I just had fun with! Yay bubbles!

Unfortunately, my nails were so destroyed after the gel fiasco that none of the polish is particularly smooth. Live and learn. I still like this manicure.

Colors

Pink: NYC – Prospect Park Bloom

Purple: Essie – Full Steam Ahead

Blue: Zoya – Wednesday

Glitter: WoW – 317

This was quick, easy, and pretty! I might have to try again with different colors when my nails regain life :-p